If you possibly can’t spend an hour or two with Colman Domingo in actual life, you possibly can nonetheless discover the important thing to his spirit—the sense of the enjoyment he each attracts from the world and places again into it—in a household {photograph} from Easter 1976. There’s Colman at age 6, a pint-size gent perched between his older sister and brother, carrying a candy-striped blazer so groovy you wouldn’t be stunned to see it on Sammy Davis Jr. at a Cocoanut Grove present. Elegant and poised, he gazes straight on the digital camera, his legs crossed simply so. He introduced this image alongside when he appeared on The View in late November, and after the present’s hosts had completed cooing over its adorableness, he offered the backstory: The navy pants he’s carrying within the picture had an identical jacket, nevertheless it was too small. He grabbed the striped one as an alternative, although his mom noticed that it didn’t fairly match. “However it makes me really feel good!” he instructed her, and as an alternative of arguing, she instructed him, “Put on what makes you are feeling good,” setting him on the trail he follows to this present day.
Domingo, now 55, is understood for his inventive but traditional red-carpet model, impressed by influences starting from Fred Astaire to the Ohio Gamers, Cary Grant to Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes—it makes excellent sense that he’s been named one of many chairs of this spring’s Met Gala, the theme of which is “Superfine: Tailoring Black Model.” Model is integral to Domingo’s spirit, as a means of speaking, of pushing out into the world, of connecting with Black women and men who got here earlier than him—which is to say that anybody who believes model is superficial hasn’t met Domingo. How he attire, how he strikes, even how he sips from a espresso cup: all these items are so casually entwined with who he’s—as a performer, actually, but in addition as a author, director, producer, and, simply typically talking, an individual who’s alive to the world—that they cost the air round him.
Generosity begins with the self, and Domingo is so comfy that he has further grace to spare. In a politically and emotionally precarious world, the place folks appear to have stopped caring for each other, these molecules of grace are like gold. “All the things I do is about radical love,” Domingo says, over a espresso on the Chelsea Resort in New York Metropolis. “It is about seeing one another. What am I doing as a inventive? It is about getting folks to assume, possibly serving to folks assume in another way. You realize, that is all I can do. The macro I can not handle. However I can handle the micro.”
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Domingo has earned a Finest Actor Academy Award nomination for his very good efficiency in Sing Sing, Greg Kwedar’s drawn-from-real-life movie about males who discover redemption by way of a jail theater program. That is Domingo’s second nomination in as a few years: he was additionally acknowledged for his flip, each charming and fiery, as civil rights activist Bayard Rustin in George C. Wolfe’s 2023 biopic Rustin. (He’s the primary actor to be nominated two years in a row since Denzel Washington, who earned nods for Fences, in 2017, and Roman J. Israel, Esq., the next yr.) He’s the anchor of Netflix’s multipart thriller The Madness, through which he performs a media pundit who stumbles right into a homicide plot within the woods of the Poconos. And the tasks he’s received going, for 2025 and past, stack far into the sky: He performs patriarch Joe Jackson in Antoine Fuqua’s upcoming Michael Jackson biopic and stars in Tina Fey’s upcoming collection The Four Seasons, a reimagining of Alan Alda’s 1981 comedy. He’s able to direct and star in a Nat King Cole biopic he’s written, and to direct a drama concerning the romance between Sammy Davis Jr. and Kim Novak too.
However even when the highlight round Domingo now appears significantly vivid, he has in truth been in every single place for some time now: Within the early 2000s he splashed out in Broadway exhibits like Passing Unusual and The Scottsboro Boys, garnering a Tony nomination for the latter. In 2022 he gained a Primetime Emmy for his recurring position in Euphoria. Moviegoers know him from footage like Lincoln, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Zola, and The Color Purple.
Nonetheless, after working as one type of performer or one other for some 35 years, he’s grateful for—and greater than a little bit stunned at—all the additional consideration he’s gotten prior to now 5 years or so. “How can I say it? I didn’t intend for this in any respect. I wished to be a revered actor, and I discovered my work as a personality actor largely within the theater. I really feel like that is the place I used to be most helpful, and that is the place I used to be greatest being served.” As he started to take extra tv roles, alternatives started shifting. “It felt just like the roles have been assembly me and I used to be assembly the roles.” Now, he is aware of precisely how lucky he’s, and he’s additionally in a spot the place he can impact change for others. “I’m like, ‘Oooh, I get to have an effect? What can I do? What can I disrupt?’” He laughs, an excellent, sonorous giggle that sounds as if it may have rolled in from the ocean, although Domingo was born and grew up in West Philly. “That is what I need to do, and actually do it in essentially the most loving, gracious, beneficiant means attainable.”
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Certainly one of Domingo’s early gigs was as a “social gathering starter” for bar mitzvahs, getting recalcitrant visitors out on the dance ground. Although he has no formal dance coaching, he strikes by way of the world on springy, lily-stem legs, and it’s arduous to think about Mrs. Rosensweig, or anybody, resisting his effervescence. However given the best way he carries himself in each interplay, it’s possible Domingo supplied one thing else too: not simply appeal and fancy footwork however security, the sensation that, in the event you be a part of him, he’ll have your again.
For his look on The View, he invited his two nieces—one is definitely a household good friend, however he considers her household—to hang around within the greenroom with him beforehand and later watch the present from the viewers. And to look at him with household—and even the small cadre of assistants readily available to make the day go easily—is to see a person who doesn’t assume twice earlier than opening a door for others, actually or figuratively. It’s not solely enjoyable to be round him, however virtually calming—as if he have been taking care of the welfare of everybody in his orbit, even amid all of the calls for that include being a hardworking performer and, now, a very well-known particular person.
His buddies appear to really feel that means too. Author-director-actor Bradley Cooper met Domingo when the 2 discovered themselves on the awards circuit final yr, Cooper for his Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro and Domingo for Rustin. “I believe it was like a CAA social gathering after the Golden Globes or one thing,” Cooper says by telephone from New York. “I went as much as him, and we had an exquisite dialog. He was only a luminous human being.” The 2 exchanged numbers and have since constructed a friendship. Domingo says Cooper has been an excellent sounding board for his Nat King Cole undertaking; Cooper demurs—he doesn’t assume he’s helped that a lot—however he values having a good friend he can discuss to about tasks that matter. “It is all the time good to speak to anyone who’s happening or has gone down an analogous path,” he says, “and every time he desires to speak about something, I might simply share my expertise and issues that I’ve discovered and have to work on, or need to work on. Anytime he is requested me one thing, I really really feel privileged that he even desires my enter.” Cooper can also be, merely, glad to have discovered a real good friend. “As you grow old, you have a tendency to not make new buddies. However I made a brand new good friend, which is form of great. And he permits that area to be a good friend to anyone, which is gorgeous.”
Domingo, like Cooper, has concepts to spare. He’s desperate to tackle larger and extra bold tasks—extra disruption of the loving, gracious, beneficiant type. However like a number of profitable folks, he’s earned his self-assurance day-by-day. He by no means thought the profession he has now was a certain factor. “I am glad that I am being met on this second on my phrases, in the best way that I wished to be seen. I did not should change into some form of different artist, who has to go away elements of themselves behind. I convey all of me into it. I convey all my years as a theater practitioner, as a director, as a author, as a producer. Even when the business wished me to only choose one.”
By showcasing his expertise throughout movie and TV, Domingo has broadened his scope in a means that permits him to share the wealth. All by way of 2024, as studio and streaming execs balked at greenlighting dangerous or bold tasks—whilst many who make their residing in TV and flicks have been nonetheless scrambling to recuperate not simply from the pandemic, however from the actors’ and writers’ strikes—the motto of many who’d seen work dry up was “Survive until ‘25.” And that was earlier than so many misplaced their properties within the horrific Los Angeles wildfires. (Domingo’s home, in Malibu, was spared.) So whereas he’s using excessive, he’s utilizing his profession not simply to achieve recognition for himself but in addition to assist decide which tales get instructed. In different phrases, it isn’t nearly climbing greater; it’s about lifting others.
His involvement with Sing Sing, as each an actor and an government producer, is a living proof. When he signed on to play John “Divine G” Whitfield—a person, wrongly imprisoned, who finds a lifeline within the performing arts—director and co-writer Kwedar, together with the movie’s different writers and producers, recommended a parity mannequin through which everybody concerned can be paid the identical charge. Domingo cherished the concept. “My coronary heart simply opened. I don’t know if it really works for each undertaking. However I believe there are parts of it that may work, particularly in relation to low-budget options. You are doing it since you like it, and also you need to be part of it.” And when the undertaking succeeds, everybody advantages, not only a few folks on the high. “I believe that is simply honest,” Domingo says. “So once we did promote the film to A24, essentially the most stunning factor was to know the checks have been being written out to each single division, and each particular person. That felt so good and so significant, particularly proper now, when the business is having an existential disaster. This mannequin may help be a sport changer, so that everybody feels revered.”
Domingo’s Sing Sing co-star, Clarence Maclin, is a veteran of the real-life jail program that impressed the movie, Rehabilitation By the Arts, and one of many many previously incarcerated males who’ve roles within the film. He performs a model of himself, a person whose capability for progress expands when he turns into concerned with this system. Maclin, who’d gotten his performing coaching at Sing Sing, with its horrible acoustics and, as he places it, “sucky sound system,” knew the best way to undertaking; Domingo helped him tailor his efficiency to the intimacy of the digital camera lens. However what Maclin took from their collaboration goes past mere recommendations on approach. “He’s the real article in relation to somebody who undoubtedly goes to be there, somebody who means what they are saying about what they need to do and what their intentions are,” Maclin says by way of Zoom. “The issues I need to be, I see in him already, and it is like a information.”
The concept, as Maclin clearly will get, is that residing on the planet means a lot greater than searching for No. 1. We have to concentrate on what connects us quite than divides us. I met with Domingo three weeks after the election, at a time when many have been nonetheless feeling surprised—and greater than a little bit helplessly frozen—by the outcomes. As a homosexual Black man, one who stands up for the folks and causes he cares about, he is aware of the street forward may be bumpy. However when he awoke on Nov. 6, he didn’t panic. As an alternative, “I assumed, OK, that is the place we’re.” Once more, he vibrates with a lot radiant vitality that it’s not possible to really feel hopeless round him. A dialog with him leaves you with the sensation that he’s handing you a key; it’s as much as you to search out the suitable door to open, however you realize you are able to do it, even in the event you’re not a spectacular-looking six-foot-plus film star who strikes by way of each area—and the world—with lanky, liquid grace. “The pendulum does swing,” he says. “My mother and father went by way of quite a bit, my grandparents went by way of even worse. And I’m right here, the place I’m in my life, but in addition as a proud descendant of slaves who lived, cherished, and fought, and sacrificed, so I could possibly be right here. So I can not maintain my head down and be unhappy or despondent about something. I’ve to roll up my sleeves to proceed to get to work: Struggle, love, be joyful in a really revolutionary means.”
That is the way you honor those that got here earlier than you whereas additionally opening a hall for everybody who will observe. That is the way you get the social gathering began.
Set design by Ibby Njoya; styling by Ola Ebiti; grooming by Mata Mariélle; manufacturing by Ragi Dholakia Productions; retouching by Contact Digital
